Wednesday, January 18, 2012

The new Charlotte-Mecklenburg school progress reports have helped me to better understand North Carolina's formula for academic growth -- and I'm a bit taken aback.

The state's "expected growth" calculation is key to state ratings and other measures CMS uses to gauge how well its schools and officials are performing. It has been explained to me as roughly translating to an average of a year's academic gain per student, based on their performance on state exams (read the state's description on pages 4-5 here).

So I was looking at West Charlotte High's progress report and scratching my head. If, as the CMS document reports, only 64 percent of last year's students demonstrated at least one year's progress, why did the school get a "high growth" rating?

The answer lies in CMS's explanation, the clearest one I've seen yet: "Each student is expected to perform as well (or better) on the End-of-Course assessment as he or she did, on average, during the previous two years. Average Growth for a school is calculated by comparing actual performance to expected performance and then averaging the difference across all students and all subjects. ... Across the state, about half of students typically meet or exceed this growth expectation. To earn the high growth designation, a school must meet the average-growth standard described above and also have more than 60% of its students make expected growth."

So a student who has performed poorly in the past will go in with a relatively low projected performance. And up to 40 percent of students at any given school can fall even further behind, making less than the gains expected based on their past performance, while the school still gets a "high growth" rating. That helps explain why CMS and the state have so many "high growth" schools (just over 81 percent statewide met or exceeded the growth standard last year) while proficiency levels remain persistently low at some of those same schools.

It's also worth noting that Ardrey Kell and Providence high schools, two of CMS' top performers, had 65 percent of students making the expected gains last year, a number barely above West Charlotte's. In cases like that, a significant number of strong students who have little trouble clearing the "grade level" bar on exams are still falling short on the progress they're expected to make. Districtwide, about 40 percent of students logged less than a year's gains.

Kudos to CMS for including a measure that gives a clearer picture of what lies behind the averages -- and how many students are continuing to fall behind. The real challenge, of course, lies in figuring out what to do about it.

The CMS schools are pushing these kids way too far, way too fast, to except them to succeed. In addition, they have teachers just out of college teaching middle school classes, and its obvious that they are full of themselves and have no interpersonal skills with which to deal with what these teenagers have going on. These teachers are young enough that they should remember the difficulties of that age....but no....they act as if it never happened to them!

Quick comment on the above sleep comment, studies (lots of them!) suggest that teenagers will go to sleep at the same time everynight and get an additional hour of sleep. I know that's true in my house, my teenagers drop at 10-10:30pm in exhaustion (but we are also involved in sport activities).

Just my thoughts, Yes on the later high school start time. I wish my kids were able to get the required 9 hours of sleep per night.

My kids go to AK so I am concerned with Ann's growth, or lack of growth, at that school. Lots of new teachers there too. My son's math teacher didn't know what she was doing and is just starting to get in the groove (and his course is over now). Do "mature" teachers mentor the new ones?

These grades will continue to fall as long as CMS continues to put mediocre teachers in schools. They did it this year so they could pay them less and work them longer. The general make up of our teachers has fallen in step with the grades. You get what you pay for plus a Broad Award ! Title one champ baby !!

What will be interesting to see is how sanitized the Observer will be during the DNC.

Afterall, President O will do the usual shout-out to Mayor Fixxit, other locals and proudly proclaim how great CMS is and how it is a shining beacon to the rest of the world because we "won" The Broad Prize.

My prediction is the Observer will do all it can to bury or refrain from having any negative articles during that time.

The reverse is true as well. If a student is a high performer and scored in the 99% and then the next year they score in the 98%, they are considered not meeting growth. This actually happened to my son and his teacher had to come up with a plan for him to "improve". These reports lack a common sense element.

Anyone throw in the fact that teacher salaries have been FROZEN for 5 to 7 years in many districts. No cost of living raises... gas, rent, food prices, everything goes through the roof and not even a 2-3% cost of living raise.

The reality is that schools are pumped full of new grads because the experienced, mentor teachers are getting out of the profession, sometimes forced into an early retirement because the school system doesn't have the money to pay them any more. Cutting costs everywhere is done by filtering in the cheap, first year teachers that make $20k-$30k less per year than the vets. You can bash the teachers, but what would you do if Bank of America froze your salary for the next 5-7 years? Would you feel under-appreciated? Would you keep buying the company line of just stick it out for the team? We're throwing money at the wrong places...and yes, this IS from a school teacher.

I think it's about time to let those students who are going to fail, fail. All the money in the world thrown at them isn't going to do any good until either the students or their parents start to care about the student's academic life.

Spend the money and the effort paying teachers correctly, developing a proper curriculum, and buying needed supplies for every student, but quit going out of the way to develop all these programs for low-performers, only to continue for the same student to be low-performing. Let's go back to the old days of school--if you show an interest, you can get help. If you don't care, flunk out and see how your life turns out. Don't undercut students who are interested in learning.

If they are getting left behind then I say leave them behind. Enough is enough. For five decades we’ve thrown trillions, TRILLIONS!, at the same demographic and the results are always the same. They only want what is handed to them, they only want a job where all the work is picked out and still get paid on Friday, they want it ALL for nothing.

GREAT teachers is the solution! Sadly, so many tenured teachers aren't great and getting rid of them is a BIG challenge.

Getting a great public education is difficult to come by no matter where you live in this country. Watch a few documentaries "Waiting for Superman" or "The Lottery" it will open your eyes as to how the United States is failing it's youth when it comes to education.

Wiley, I'd be delighted to see and report great success from Project LIFT, but I surely don't remember predicting it. I generally wait to report what actually happens on various efforts, which isn't always success. Did I have a crystal-ball episode I've forgotten about?

So I was looking at West Charlotte High's progress report and scratching my head. If, as the CMS document reports, only 64 percent of last year's students demonstrated at least one year's progress, why did the school get a "high growth" rating?

Your "prediction" is reporting "high growth" even though the way it is calculated is suspect.

Project LIFT will be calculated in some related manner to show "it worked" to justify spending $55 million dollars.

On the grad rate, more kerfuffling to me is the number on the progress report showing 98.2 percent of all CMS high school students are "anticipated to graduate on time." The data folks are re-running that one, because it's just not consistent with the fact that only 74 percent of them actually do. If it's not an actual error, it's a meaningless number, best I can tell.

That is why the PfP or Teacher Effectiveness Project or whatever the hell they want to call it next week WONT WORK. The stats never match up ! How do you compare AK and West Charlotte students? How do you compare socioeconomic data with half class sizes and twice the spending? The public nor teachers TRUST the DATA !!! Please hire more "communications" employees to sell this worhless crap.

Here is an actual solution. TRADE SCHOOLS. Not ALL students have the desire or intellectual aptitude to go to college. Many would or do have the ambition to start a paycheck as soon as possible. Give the student the option of general studies for 2 hours of the day and trade and skills training the rest. This could also be combined with apprentice and job shadow time during and after school. Trillions wasted without measurable results is RIGHT. Start now and train our students for a better tomorrow.

I agree about the PfP plan to the extent which it depends on those bogus numbers they use to measure student progress.

Bad stuff. I just started reading an explanation of that (with their "justification" for the formulas they used) and it reeked.

Unfortunately, I'm not paid to analyze their analysis, so it's not an efficient use of my time to do so when I realize that it will most likely change nothing.

But, if I were a teacher whose pay depended on this crap, I'd get a group together and pay someone to write a solid critique, and then use it to embarrass educrats at every public forum possible.

I still think one of the biggest holes they have is in their analysis of individual student performance.

Their comparisons between entire schools isn't as bad and seems to fit with normal statistics.

I've noticed that the same techniques are used in other school systems in California for instance with a better explanation of how they compare schools, but none fot how they justify their calculations of change for individuals.

I just want to be everyone who reads these blogs understands where most of the posters are coming from in this debate. While a few have been forthright in their pessimism of the operation of CMS and of public schools in general, most of us truly believe in public education. For example, a number of posters have been critical of FRL. They do not mean they do not belive in the purpose and use of the program. They know and totally support the notion that there are poor families out there and they need this program. They criticze the program because of its lack of accountability and apparent unwillingness by too many to deal with the fraud. Additionally, its fraudulent numbers have expanded into too many reaches of spending education dollars.

We (well most of us) believe an informed and knowledgable citizenry is vital to our democracy and way of life. But as we have seen, our society has digressed into the battle of who can confiscate hard earned money of other people and exert thier power to the point the producers have lost their voice at the ballot box.

Humans are born with "free will". You can spout all these "Be kool, stay in school" cliches you want but some people have to learn by the "school of hard knocks". That is why CPCC is there for when someone decides to get their act together and get with the program. There is a way for them to do so.

So I do not believe there is much "left behind" but rather they choose and the family unit chooses to not "get with the program".